The Fifth Heart

by Dan Simmons

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll go along with Cameron, Hay, the Lodges, and the rest. Although I saw the Philadelphia World’s Fair and it was a monumental bore.”

  Holmes actually smiled.

  As he prepared to leave, Adams gripped his arm and said, “But why would they kill Clover? Why would anyone want to harm that witty, sad, lonely, darling woman?”

  Holmes settled back into his seat, sighed, and reached into his upper inside jacket pocket to pull out a small blue envelope still tied in pink ribbon. It had been opened. Holmes removed the handwritten letter and held it so that Adams could put on his glasses and read it across the wide desk.

  Henry Adams read his own handwriting for half a moment and then let out an inarticulate noise and lunged for the letter.

  “No,” said Holmes, folding it, and putting it back into his jacket pocket. “I can’t allow you to tear this up the way you did the card earlier.”

  “That’s my property!” snarled the small historian.

  Holmes nodded. “Legally it is, sir. Even though it was in the possession of another person.”

  “Why would Lizzie . . . how did you . . . why would she give you that most intimate of letters? My greatest folly?”

  “She didn’t give it to me,” said Holmes. “She doesn’t know I have it. I had to borrow it. When my investigations are done, I shall return it to where she kept it hidden.”

  “Investigations . . .” hissed Adams in contempt. “Reading other people’s most private mail. Sneaking into boudoirs in the night. Stealing . . .”

  “I assure you that I shall return it in the next few weeks,” said Holmes. “Mrs. Cameron shall never know that I had taken the letter from its hiding place. I simply needed to know for sure what Rebecca Lorne and the so-called Clifton Richards were using to blackmail Mrs. Adams.”

  “Blackmail?” It sounded as if Henry Adams were going to start laughing wildly. “Then I did kill Clover Adams. I was the cause, alpha and omega, of my darling’s death.”

  “No,” said Holmes. “It was my duty in solving this case to find and read this letter, Mr. Adams, but I assure you that I took no pleasure in doing so. And I found no evil there. It was a note from a terribly sad man who had been essentially abandoned by a wife lost to melancholy not merely in the previous months but for years . . . a midnight love letter to another woman, one he knew well and admired much. It was folly, Mr. Adams, but exquisitely human and understandable folly.”

  “We went to the Camerons’ house on the evening of December fourth,” said Adams, speaking as if mesmerized, his eyes unfocused. “Two days before Clover . . . before her death. Lizzie Cameron had been ill and Clover had been unusually distraught about the illness. She knew . . . we all knew . . . that a major source of Lizzie’s illness lay in the travesty of her marriage to Don. Clover felt bad about that as well. That night we took Rebecca Lorne with us . . . it was warm, I remember, not feeling like December at all.

  “To cheer Lizzie up, Clover had brought along a large bouquet of yellow Marechal Niel roses—not easy to find in December in Washington—and she and Rebecca took the roses up to Lizzie’s sickroom. Do you know the language of flowers, Mr. Holmes?”

  “Only bits of it.”

  Adams smiled with no humor. “In the language of flowers so popular these days, the yellow roses signified ‘I’m yours, heart and soul.’ This is what she gave Lizzie Cameron less than forty-eight hours before her death.”

  “She was giving that message to you,” Holmes said softly.

  Adams shook his head. “If Clover knew about my . . . my mad, impulsive letter to Lizzie of the previous July . . . that letter . . .” He pointed at Holmes’s breast pocket. “And begged to know if it was true . . . if Rebecca Lorne had tantalized her with the knowledge of that letter, or even of the possibility of its existence . . . and if Lizzie did not deny it . . .”

  Holmes reached across the desk and touched Adams’s forearm, squeezing it very softly. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Adams. You know Clover’s good heart. Her flower-language expressions to her sick friend were almost certainly just that—an act of love and generosity.”

  But Holmes knew that there had been a confrontation of sorts over the letter from Henry Adams that night. Clover had asked Lizzie Cameron if it was true . . . if such a letter from “my Henry” existed. Lizzie had been sick and in a foul mood and, while ridiculing the entire idea, had also gone out of her way not to deny. She even teased Clover and Rebecca Lorne for wanting to see “such a curious document”. Holmes knew all this because, besides liberating that letter from Lizzie Cameron’s hiding place of letters taped to the bottom of her dresser drawer, he’d also borrowed her private 1885 diary long enough to read entries from the first week of December. The diary had been put back in place—at some risk to Holmes’s agent in these matters—but he would keep the July letter, and other letters taken from other homes by the same dirty means, until events of the next few weeks were settled.

  Holmes could see and feel Adams approaching his personal breaking point. This was the man who, after his wife’s death, had fled to the South Seas with an artist friend for three years and more than 30,000 miles of aimless wandering. This was the man who had sworn the great sculptor Saint-Gaudens to secrecy and then had him build that mausoleum for the living inside the extraordinary memorial not to his wife’s memory—but to the memory of his own grief.

  Standing, his hat and cane in hand, Holmes paused and removed another slip of paper from his jacket. “Hay gave me this, although all your friends know it, Adams. Clover . . . Mrs. Adams . . . began a letter to her sister Ellen shortly after you left that Sunday morning to visit your dentist. I know you remember the words but it might help find perspective to hear them again:

  If I had one single point of character or goodness I would stand on that and grow back to life. Henry is more patient and loving than words can express. God might envy him—he bears and hopes and despairs hour after hour . . . Henry is beyond all words tenderer and better than all of you even.

  Holmes folded the note and set it away next to the blue-paper letter. “She wrote that note, Mr. Adams, after she had learned of the possible existence of your July letter to Lizzie Cameron. She had already forgiven you.”

  Adams stood and turned his unfathomable gaze toward the detective. “When must I see you next, Mr. Holmes? What new hell awaits me . . . all of us?”

  “Chicago,” said Holmes. He let himself out quietly without calling for Hobson the butler.

  PART 3

  ONE

  Thursday, April 13, 10:00 a.m.

  My plan for opening the Chicago World’s Fair part of our tale was to explain why Henry James—against all his instincts and habits—would accompany Holmes on this part of the detective’s adventure. But the odd truth is, I don’t know why James did so.

  We all know individuals who shield their thoughts better than others, but both Sherlock Holmes and Henry James have been the most difficult minds to penetrate in my long experience both of knowing people and of entering the thoughts of characters. Holmes’s tight grip on his secrets and modes of thinking is understandable: the detective is a self-made gentleman with a base and secret history from the London streets and the majority of his life has been one long, dangerous high-wire act of exercising both his astounding intellect and indomitable will. Holmes’s mind and heart—what there is of a heart—work in ways both too alien and difficult for most of us to understand. Or to bear if we could understand them.

  But Henry James’s thoughts and feelings are hidden behind an even thicker layer of psychic armor. Like Holmes, James has created himself—the artist Self, the Master Self, the married-only-to-his-art bachelor Self—out of whole cloth and through sheer effort of will, perhaps following John Keats’s dictum of “That which is creative must create itself.” But unlike the detective, James has attempted to hide the core of himself even from himself. Every word he has ever written—in letters, introductions
, and fiction—threatens to reveal something, however ephemeral, that the writer does not want revealed. His self-discipline in avoiding such revelations has been painfully effective. His success in keeping his inner thoughts and his reasons for most of the decisions in his life secret has led us to this point where we can only stand outside that tightly banded and seemingly contradicted construct that is Henry James and wonder at his choices.

  At any rate, James has chosen to follow Holmes to Chicago and I ask his pardon and yours for jumping ahead a couple of days in the strict chronology of the tale before doubling back to earlier events.

  On their second day in Chicago, Sherlock Holmes insisted on taking Henry James on a brief morning excursion tour by boat of the new White City of the Columbian Exposition. The small steamship left from a pier in downtown Chicago not far from the hotel where they were staying. While never stopping at the Exposition and carefully avoiding the huge pier with its automated people-mover still under construction and extending far out into the lake from the World’s Fair site, the tour gave gawkers a ninety minute glimpse of the Exposition structures from Lake Michigan.

  “I’m not sure of the purpose of this outing,” James said as he stood near Holmes at the starboard railing of the noisy little tour boat. The modern, three-decked steamship with rows of seats on each of its roofed levels could safely carry about 300 people—the ship was named Columbus and would be a ferry to the Exposition after the official opening on May 1, coming and going every hour to carry new revelers to the Exposition grounds and exhausted fairgoers back to their downtown hotels—but today there were about fifty people aboard to take the short scenic cruise down to Jackson Park, and with the exception of James and the almost always impassive Holmes, all aboard seemed profoundly excited about the simple act of glimpsing some unfinished buildings.

  “I’m showing you the future,” said Holmes.

  There had been a haze along the lakeshore when the tour boat left the downtown Chicago pier but now, as they approached the Jackson Park area which held the Fair, the haze lifted and the sunlight took on an almost personal presence, warming the tourists and illuminating everything along the shoreline as if a huge searchlight had been trained on it. James knew that, technically, Jackson Park had been a southern extension of Chicago proper—away from the shore, 63rd Street had boasted a few shops and homes already—but this square mile of lakefront now housing the Exposition had been the worst sort of swampy, sandy, dead, and desiccated place, unwanted even by the land speculators who’d hurled the boundaries of Chicago further and further out onto the prairie following the deliberate extensions of the city’s railroad system miles beyond the edges of the existing Chicago.

  America’s newspapers, for almost two years, had enjoyed telling the tale of how the famous eastern architects—the best in the nation—chosen by the Exposition czar Daniel Hudson Burnham, had been horrified to learn that under a foot of black soil all throughout the swampy islands of this Jackson Park site, construction diggers would encounter only more unsettling sand and super-saturated soil. Burnham had been asking these famous architects to design what would, for the duration of the Exposition, be the largest structures in North America (and, when Mr. Ferris’s Wheel would be completed in June, the tallest) on mud—quicksand, really—rather than on the bedrock these architects were so used to in New York and elsewhere in the East.

  It took about an hour for carriages to travel from downtown Chicago to the Fair site in Jackson Park, less time for the many yellow rail-cars—called “cattle cars” by the Exposition-savvy Chicagoans—that had been laid on to take the special spur line south straight to Jackson Park and the gates of the Fair. When speculators had refused to rent or sell airspace over the avenues leading south to the Fair for less than 100% profit for themselves, the railroad execs had designed the elevated special rail line to the Fair with its constant stream of yellow cars tailored to fit down the narrow north-south alleys where no air-space needed to be purchased.

  It took the Columbus tour boat about twenty-five minutes to reach the Fair site in Jackson Park.

  “Good heavens,” said James.

  In almost three decades of living and traveling abroad, James had seen enough architectural wonders that most of the new structures that Americans seemed so proud of seemed small or ugly or far too utilitarian in comparison to the millenniums of beauty he’d seen in Europe. But the White City was something totally new to him. For a moment he could only grip the rail and gawk.

  “My heavens,” he said again after a breathless moment.

  What had been swampland had been transformed into more than a square mile of white stone walks, countless white buildings of immense and staggering size, soaring sculptures, giant domes, gracefully arching bridges, green lawns, a forested island, and fields of flowers.

  The daylight on the white buildings seemed to make the White City incandescent. James found himself squinting. Downtown Chicago was a relatively new city—most of the buildings had been built since the terrible 1871 fire—but now the author realized that it was a dark, dirty, Black City compared to the vision before him. In Chicago itself, dark brick buildings grew ever taller to block the light from reaching the shorter buildings and sidewalks all around them. The cavernous streets were made even darker by the tracks for the elevated trains running overhead. Except for the rare buildings facing Lake Michigan, Chicago was a box-canyon city of darkness, dirt, noise, and grime. James knew that his beloved London was equally dirty—or more so—but at least it had the good grace to hide its filth in the thick, dangerous coal fogs a good part of the year.

  Quiet until now, Holmes suddenly started playing the part of tour guide.

  “There are fourteen of those so-called Great Buildings in the White City. The huge one we’re approaching now is called the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building and encloses one point three million square feet of space. The roof itself is a clear span some three hundred sixty-eight feet long and two hundred and six feet high. It alone had thirteen acres of surface to paint. Besides the Great Buildings, there are two hundred more buildings in the White City, including one representing each of the forty-seven states in the Union plus all territories.”

  James smiled, amused at having his own tour guide with a British accent. Some were edging closer along the railing to hear what Holmes was saying.

  “When President Cleveland turns on the switch on the first of May,” continued Holmes, either not noticing or simply ignoring the other listeners, “the White City’s dynamos will provide three times the total amount of electric power available in Chicago and more than ten times that provided for the eighteen eighty-nine Paris Exposition. The White City has more than a hundred and twenty thousand incandescent lights, and seven thousand arc lights to illuminate its boulevards, grounds, pathways, and fountains. There will be very few if any dark corners in the White City and the designers have hired their own police force—the two thousand members of the Columbian Guards—not only to apprehend those who have committed crimes or disturbed the civic peace but to stop those crimes before they occur. No other city in Europe or America has what I consider so enlightened a law-enforcement policy.”

  “What’s the huge but ugly and unfinished thing there, some distance north and a bit west of the big Manufactures Building?” asked James, gesturing with his walking stick. “It looks as if they are building the hull for Noah’s Ark.”

  “That’s to be the White City’s answer to the Eiffel Tower that was such a hit at the Paris Exposition,” said Holmes. “A certain Mr. Ferris is building a giant Wheel that theoretically will carry up to forty people in each of its thirty-six railcar-sized viewing cabins. The passengers will ascend some two hundred sixty-four feet into the air at the height of each revolution, giving—Mr. Ferris and the White City designers promise—an amazing view of Lake Michigan, the White City including the Midway Plaisance with all of its other diversions, and the Chicago skyline. What you see there is only the framework of the bottom half of the
huge Wheel. They’ll soon be bringing in and mounting an axle that I’m told is the heaviest piece of steel ever constructed on this continent. The axle shaft will be some forty-five feet long and will weigh forty-six tons and will have to be strong enough to bear a burden of the Wheel’s own steel, carriages, and people that will amount to six times the weight of some cantilever bridge across the Ohio River at Cincinnati that you Americans seem so proud of. The White City people and Mr. Ferris keep promising that the great Wheel will be finished and carrying passengers by the middle of the summer, if not earlier.”

  “Where did you get all this information, Holmes?” said James. “All these facts and figures don’t sound like you.”

  Holmes turned his back on the White City, leaned back against the railing, and smiled. “It’s true that I’m often arithmetically challenged, as my brother Mycroft has pointed out on far too many occasions. But I had a private tour yesterday while you were in the hotel talking to the ailing Mr. Clemens and even a dullard can remember certain facts for a short period of time. It’s how one passes through Cambridge or Oxford with Honors, as I’m sure you know.”

  James watched the White City as the Columbus made a wide, cautious arc around the 2,500-foot-long pier extending into Lake Michigan, its surface covered with workers and carts as the linear and then circular Movable Sidewalk took its final shape down the center of the wide pier.

  “It will cost ten cents to ride on the Sidewalk the length of the pier where the steamers will drop you the half-mile to the entrance of the Exposition,” said Holmes without turning around to look at it. “My guess is that most first-time visitors will try it just for the novelty.”

  James marveled at the tidy lagoons and carefully groomed streams that ran through the entire White City. Someone had turned a muck-ridden swamp into a cleaner, wider, airier version of James’s beloved Venice.